A large sand dune rose behind us. We struggled to the top and looked out in the early morning light. Multicolored tents spread into the distance. Beyond them was nothing but desert, dotted sporadically with trees. A single road traversed the landscape, running north and south along the ocean.
“You have to be poor if you can’t afford a house in this town,” said Zeller.
“Do you own a house?” Santiago asked.
Zeller shook his head.
We walked back down the dune to the shore. After talking it over briefly, we decided to walk north, beside the road. My boots quickly filled with sand. The wind picked up and blew dust into our eyes. As I walked behind Santiago, I looked at his neck, covered with grime and blood.
For some reason I remembered an exchange I’d had with Santiago back at Fort Drum. He’d said to me, “You have a little Santiago in you, and I have a little Stantz in me.” As if that was supposed to make us best friends.
After we’d walked for some time, we came across a man fishing in the ocean. He walked into the waves up to his waist, and cast the lure with all his might, as if he were trying to cast the city and all its curses right out of him.
Santiago sat down in the white sand. I turned and looked at the tents some distance behind us. There was no one else around, but we were still in the open.
I hadn’t noticed it at night, but now I could see that there was garbage strewn all over the beach and bobbing in the shallows. The water smelled like raw sewage, much worse than where we’d slept. It occurred to me that the people who lived here probably dumped everything they had into the tiny creeks that emptied into the ocean. With all the sewage and trash, the air was heavy with flies.
The man caught three fish in a row, throwing them quickly to shore. “Jesus,” Zeller whispered, “look at that.”
As he came up out of the water to line his fish up on the shore before us, he looked at us with a smile. His mouth was spotted with rotten and missing teeth.
One of the fish was deformed by an old wound. It looked as if something had taken a bite out of it. The man held it up for us to see the deformity.
“What a beaut,” said Santiago.
The man nodded in agreement. Then he turned and waded back into the water.
“God, my neck hurts,” Santiago said. It had to be bad for him to even say that. Blood had dried under his nose and around his mouth. He stretched out and rested his head on the dirt behind him.
“We still have the kit,” I said. “We’re out of compound presses, but I could try to clean that wound and put some stitches in.” I leaned over him to look at it. The bandage had fallen off to the side, and I could see the torn flesh. The bullet had somehow missed the artery, and there wasn’t much of an entry or exit wound, so it would be relatively easy to close if he’d let me.
“Don’t fucking touch it,” he said. He pushed the dirty compound press back over the wound so I couldn’t see it. “You two stay the fuck away from me.”
After I had walked away, he pulled the bandage aside, took some alcohol out of the kit, and poured it over the wound. It hissed and bubbled.
The fisherman was still working the sea like a conjurer. Wherever he threw his line he seemed to catch a fish. He was pulling them out left and right and tossing them to shore. There was a nice pile in front of us.
After we’d watched the man fish for a few minutes, Zeller stood up and walked down to the shore. At first the man didn’t see him, but then he did, and after a brief look of indignation, he watched silently as Zeller picked up a fish in each hand, then turned and walked back up to me and Santiago. The fish were hideously ugly, but Zeller stuffed them into his pack and we all stood to move out.
Having walked for some time along the shore, we came across a single abandoned building that had been largely destroyed. We sat in the rubble just up from the beach and rested. From this vantage point we could see the trucks that Michael had told us about. They’d speed by carrying dozens of people packed in the back of the truck, others packed in the cab, and often several more perched awkwardly on the roof. Most of these trucks looked to be heading back into the city.
We waited a long time before we saw one that was going in our direction. As it approached, we broke cover and waved for it to slow. The driver stopped and looked down at us, along with all his passengers.
“Hello,” said Santiago.
The driver just stared back at us. The man sitting next to him leaned over and whispered something in his ear.
“Hello,” Santiago said, louder this time.
“No.” The reply came from one of the men on the roof. “The roads are closed for the monsoon.” Then he said something we couldn’t understand to the driver. The driver laughed and the truck lurched forward, slowly at first. Then it pulled away, the passengers all looking back at us.
Dejected, we walked back to the rubble. We waited there in vain for another hour or so, then walked back down to the beach and started out again. The sky was getting darker with each passing moment and the wind was picking up, swirling in off the ocean. I brought up the rear as we walked along the beach, leaving footprints that the tide
